With all the other HCR news, you may have missed this important tidbit. (I know I did.)
House Votes To Repeal Antitrust Exemption for Health Insurance Firms Thursday, February 25, 2010
On Wednesday, the House voted 406-19 to end a 65-year-old antitrust exemption for health insurance companies, part of Democrats' broader strategy to revive their health reform efforts ahead of Thursday's bipartisan health care summit, Roll Call reports (Dennis, Roll Call, 2/25).
The bill (HR 4626) would amend the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act, which exempts insurers from federal antitrust law if they are regulated by the states.
Democrats See GOP Hypocrisy in Health Care Debate Citing 2003 Medicare vote, Democrats see GOP hypocrites in debate over health care spending
Charles Babington, AP Writer
Dec 25, 2009
[...] when Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House in 2003, they overcame Democratic opposition to add a deficit-financed prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The program will cost a half-trillion dollars over 10 years, or more by some estimates.
With no new taxes or spending offsets accompanying the Medicare drug program, the cost has been added to the federal debt.
[...]
Six years ago, "it was standard practice not to pay for things," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
I'm not sure if anyone in my little political junkie clique here comprehends how much I hate hate HATE electoral politics. But I gotta tell ya. My Bullshit Detector has been polished and fine tuned in the past year. I watched only a clip snip of Axelrod on the shows this morning and then I went a-reading / scanning the blogs, and ... if these guys spin this HCR POS Reform any harder .... they're gonna land themselves on the frikkin moon.
Markos is a hater! Responding to a fund-raising email from Obama kos says, in part:
Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we're supposed to get excited about whatever end result we're about to get, so much so that we're going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I'm certainly not biting. In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform. The administration may be happy to declare victory with a mandate that enriches insurance companies, yet creates little incentive to control costs or change the very business practices that have screwed so many people. But I'll pass.
I am no genius when it comes to a complete understanding of the details of this legislation. But I know what a monopoly is and I know you can't regulate a monopoly no matter how many laws you pass or how many goodies you hand out to mask the fact we are about to give billions of dollars to ... a monopoly.
Without a public option, there is no counter to this monopoly. Insurance companies win. The rest of us lose.
But Democratic aides said that the group had tentatively agreed on a proposal that would replace a government-run health care plan with a menu of new national, privately-run insurance plans modeled after the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which covers more than eight million federal workers, including members of Congress, and their dependents. (See this earlier Prescriptions article about how the group of 10 has been thinking about this approach.)
A government-run plan would be retained as a fall-back option, the aides said, and would be triggered only if the new proposal failed to meet targets for providing affordable insurance coverage to a specified number of people.
The agreement would also allow Americans between age 55 and 64 to buy coverage through Medicare, beginning in 2011.
EDIT: Check out the essay by Jamess on what this loss means.
"Senators are making great progress and we're pleased that they're working together to find common ground toward options that increase choice and competition."
Reading between the lines here in a statement from a team who knows President Obama has been accused of not standing firm enough for a public option, they think what happened in the meeting may strike the right political balance.
Just two days after announcing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held a jobs summit:
With unemployment levels above 10 percent, Obama said "We cannot hang back and hope for the best."
But, mindful of growing anxiety about federal deficits, Obama also tempered his upbeat talk with an acknowledgment that government resources could only go so far and that it is primarily up to the private sector to create large numbers of new jobs.
He said while he's "open to every demonstrably good idea ... we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited."
Beyond the question of why a Democratic president is giving lip service to deficit hawks at a moment that screams for more Keynesian stimulus, the real question is this: why is it that we have to endure nearly a year of grueling political games just to get a weak, watered down health care bill that we have been told, all along, has to be deficit-neutral, yet no one bats an eye at throwing tens of billions more each year into wars?
"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs,
neither cast ye your pearls before swine,
lest they trample them under their feet,
and turn again and rend you." Matthew 7:6
Yeah, okay, so the piece that ek posted the other day, Dont Ask, Don't Give, kinda ticked me off. Not at ek for posting it, no. Just the whole idea of giving money to the DNC or any of those vermin annoys me. Like... ever. Not that I have any to give, and I never have, but if I did, I wouldn't.
A friend of mine works for a right wing idiot. She sometimes shares with me their political correspondence. His politics usually doesn't get any more sophisticated than generic right wing talking points. The stupid does, indeed, burn. But one recent exchange really distilled it, for me. I had forwarded her the link to my recent post about people who will die, if health care "reform" doesn't include a public option. Because even if new laws bar private insurers from excluding people with pre-existing conditions, nothing now and nothing in the current proposals prevents private insurers from denying patients expensive life-saving treatments. The newspaper article on which my diary was based referred specifically to Nataline Sarkisyan, the seventeen-year old who died when her private insurer refused to pay for a needed liver transplant. And my friend forwarded back to me her boss's response. Which was simply to ask how much a public option would cost, along with his typically mind-numbingly inane parrot-point about "unfunded mandates." It took about a day for it to sink in. What kind of person, when told about a teenager who died because she couldn't get life-saving medical care, responds by asking about the cost? What does it say about such a person's basic human values? It's hard even to respond to such a sick, soulless attitude. This man has daughters. But I guess if he has enough insurance for them, the rest of the world can go ahead and die. He doesn't care.
In case you're unaware, there is currently a bill in the Pennsylvania state legislature to establish a statewide single-payer (that's something close to Medicare for all) system. Governor Rendell has pledged to sign it if it gets to his desk, and there are currently 35 co-sponsors in the House - including 4 Republicans - and 9 co-sponsors in the Senate. That's out of a Senate of 50 and a House of 203.
This Friday, the 30th, there will be a protest at a Blue Cross/Blue Shield building in Philadelphia in support of single payer, and in my state of Pennsylvania this will have particular significance because of how close we are to real health care reform.
IMPORTANT: If you can't make it to the protest, but live in Pennsylvania, please contact your state legislators and/or the media to either thank them for their support or to urge them to support these bills (SB 400 and HB 1660). You can do that here.
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.
Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.
A 1993 study found that those without health insurance are 25% more likely to die. That study put the number of annual deaths at 18,00 a year. The new study used the same methodology. It excludes people over the age of 65, because they have health insurance. It's called Medicare. A government run health plan. The increased number of deaths is due largely to the increased number of uninsured. 27,000 more, each year. Since 1993. Since the Clinton Administration's attempt to reform health care was destroyed, largely by the insurance industry.
March on Washington
